Tuesday, May 11, 2010

I'm going to go ahead and say it: I really friggin hate vanity license plates. Or, more specifically, I hate the type of people who think that putting a few different letters on the back of their car for no apparent purpose is a perfectly valid way to spend a few hundred bucks. I can't imagine how much disposable income I would have to have before I was so lost for ways to spend my fortune that I handed over a spare $250 for my car to be officially labelled as 'DJ-5LY'. It would have to be $250 that I found in change on the floors of my many luxury cars. Well, when I say 'change' I mean 'fifties', but that would be change to me, you know?

I always take note of such plates when I see them around, because I love to imagine the type of person who would have thought that was a good idea. I recently passed a parked car in a wealthy suburb that bore the license plate:

WWJD

I really wanted to leave a note that said 'I'm not sure, but I imagine spending hundreds of dollars on a personalised scrap of metal probably wouldn't have been high on his to-do list.' Sadly, I didn't have a pen.

Most of the people I imagine behind those plates are not the type of people I imagine wanting to be friends with. I might even have thrown punches at the likes of 2HOT4U for simply being such tremendous wankers. Although I do kind of want to meet the guy behind BMMEUP, provided that it does mean 'beam me up' and not 'bowel movement me up'. You can never tell these days.

I was wondering about which other things people have paid to have attached to their car and I remembered hearing about a search engine of combinations that are still available. I had a look and didn't find that, but I did manage to find a bunch of ads for registered vanity plates in all Australian states. There were quite a few that had me truly scratching my head.

I understand that a lot of specific names are taken but when you're going to go as generic as MISTER you may as well just stick with the random letters, in my opinion. And is WORKM8 really the most impressive thing you could say about yourself?

There was someone selling one that said 'CIVIC' which I can imagine someone thinking was a great idea when their judgement was impaired in some way, then having to sell it when they woke up and realised that having a Honda Civic isn't really something that you're supposed to brag about. Unless it's the exact opposite of all those Civics with 'PORCHE' licence plates and they're just being horribly ironic. And I'm sure the owner of BADSTI meant... something else. Anything else. Maybe it was somebody's initials. But surely, SURELY, they would have noticed that it could be interpreted to mean the driver of the car is currently sporting an unfortunate and embarrassing infection. Surely at least one person would have pointed that out.

Then there were some that I really couldn't figure out. When I first saw the plate EMAILS for sale, I thought it might have been intended for some kind of business car. But then I couldn't figure out what kind of company could best sum up what they do with the word EMAILS. Do they send emails? Do they sell them? Are they a spam company? Or am I barking up the wrong tree entirely and is Emails someone's name? Spoilt rich kids sprung from the loins of eccentrics in the early nineties would be about the right age for receiving name plates as gifts, so that kind of checks out.

-Smackie Onassis

P.S. There is a new poll that I put up the other day. Choose which lie I should add to my CV!